Documentary Maker Jehane Noujaim Played Role in Egyptian Protests

Ahmed Hassan, a liberal protester in Egypt, is one of the main characters in the documentary “The Square.”

Documentary director Jehane Noujaim was part of the mass protests in Egypt even as she recorded them during the 18 days she spent in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in early 2011, she said Sunday night in New York.

“We were all there as Egyptian protesters. We were part of something that felt bigger than us.”

The Egyptian-American film maker spoke after her work, “The Square,” was presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which is showing the 15 documentaries on a short list of possible nominees for the Oscar. The five nominees will be announced Jan. 16.

Noujaim’s film focuses on six main characters involved in protests in Egypt during the past three years. They include Khalid Abdalla, a British actor of Egyptian heritage who appeared in the movies “United 93,” “The Kite Runner” and “Green Zone,” and Egyptian human rights lawyer Ragia Omran, who received the 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award last month.

Also featured are Ahmed Hassan, a liberal protester who ended up filming about a quarter of the documentary, and Magdy Ashour, a 25-year member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which became the strongest political organization in Egypt with the 2012 election of President Mohamed Morsi.

“The Square” shows Hassan and Ashour in some heated arguments about Egyptian politics and the future of that country.

Noujaim, 39, was raised in Kuwait and Egypt before moving with her family to Boston when she was a teenager. She graduated from Harvard in 1996 and has made other documentaries, including “Rafea: Solar Mama” in 2012 and “Control Room” in 2004.

She met all of the main characters in “The Square” during those 18 days of protests in 2011 that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for 30 years. “They were all sleeping in tents next to me,” she said.

As a film maker, she was looking for characters who would lead the viewers through the story. Because the documentary was self-funded, “you better be enjoying the people you’re following,” she said.

“The hardest thing in making films is figuring out how to end them,” said Noujaim, who was detained twice by Egyptian authorities during the filming. Once she was taken in for questioning about whether she made political films, then released. Another time, she was “disappeared for eight hours.” Omran tweeted her photo to let people know she had been taken and helped gain her release.

Some of those she followed in the documentary were arrested and injured during protesters’ battles with the Egyptian police and military.

“The Square” won the Audience Award for World Cinema: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last January and the People’s Choice Documentary Award at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

It has been shown once in Egypt, privately at a small film festival, and Noujaim said the producers have submitted the film to the Egyptian government for permission to release it publicly there.

The initial filming was funded with Noujaim’s savings and credit cards and the production was running “on fumes” when Geralyn Dreyfous, a consultant to philanthropies and founder of the Utah Film Center, signed on as an executive producer. Dreyfous helped raise money for final editing and postproduction work. More than $100,000 was raised in a campaign on Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website.

Noujaim said the film makers relied on grants rather than sell an equity interest in the movie because they wanted to be able to release it for free in Egypt as well as to retain control over its contents.

The version of “The Square” shown at Sundance ended with Morsi’s election as the first Egyptian head of state ever chosen in a democratic vote. Noujaim later re-edited it to add footage shot during protests this summer that led to Morsi’s removal from office.

She said Egypt is writing a new constitution, which she called an improvement over the one written under Morsi though “it has a long way to go.”

After the constitution is adopted, the country will hold parliamentary and presidential elections.

She compared the current struggle for democracy in Egypt to the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s, saying the latter helped change people’s consciousness of how African-Americans were being treated.

“That’s the kind of thing happening in Egypt,” she said. “It takes a long time.”

But Noujaim was optimistic about Egypt’s future, pointing to a section of “The Square” in which Hassan notes that children are playing “protest.” “That wasn’t OK when I was growing up in Egypt,” she added.

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